Intuit Moving Ahead With Connected Services Strategy

In fiscal 2008, Intuit’s (NASDAQ:INTU) new CEO, Brad Smith, announced the company’s connected services strategy, which targets a market where people and businesses are increasingly connected, whether through desktop, laptop, or handheld devices. Last year, Intuit made two major acquisitions – PayCycle (now Intuit Online Payroll) and Mint.com, that support this strategy. More than 56% of the company’s $3.2 billion in fiscal 2009 revenue came from connected services. >>>

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Indian IT Services: Globalization and Products

A recent Morningstar report on the IT services and consulting industry projects client demand to rise. Morningstar notes that the U.S. Tech Pulse Index has been rising since May of last year and registered 14.2% annualized growth in December 2009. No wonder ITO and BPO players in India are hiring and expanding their delivery capabilities to cater to the growing demand. >>>

AMD, Nvidia Lose Share As Intel Leads The Graphics Market

According to a recent Jon Peddie Research report, Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) increased its graphics chip market share to 55.2% driven by strong Atom sales while Nvidia’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) share declined to 24.3% and AMD’s (NYSE:AMD) share declined slightly to 19.9%. Let’s take a closer look. >>>

Content Players Contemplating iPad Effect

Ad spend analysts labeled 2009 as one of the worst years in terms of ad numbers. Ad spending in 2009 fell 10.2% over the year, according to ZenithOptimedia. Numbers are expected to improve in 2010, which should see 0.9% growth over the year to $448 billion. Overall ad spend is expected to continue to grow at 3.9% in 2011 and 4.8% in 2012 with recovery driven by emerging markets. >>>

Changing Business Mix At HP And Dell

Over the past decade, IBM (NYSE: IBM) has exited commoditized businesses and shifted its focus to high-margin software and services. HP is taking a different path of diversifying its portfolio to capitalize on the trend towards converged infrastructure products that integrate storage, networking, servers, and management software. In 2008, HP acquired EDS for $13.9 billion, a move that strengthened its services business and last year, it announced its plans to buy 3Com for $2.7 billion to fortify its networking arm in order to take on Cisco. Cisco has long been a preferred supplier for HP, but Cisco’s new unified data center strategy has turned the relationship sour. Cisco has now said that it will no longer renew its relationship with HP. >>>

30,000-foot SaaS Trends: Huge Growth

The recession has highlighted the importance of SaaS and its cost efficiencies. In a report released this week, Global Industry Analysts projects the SaaS in enterprise application software (EAS) market to reach $23.15 billion by 2015. >>>

Mobile Phone Market Movements

IDC recently reported that the worldwide mobile phone market grew 11.3% in the fourth quarter of 2009 after five consecutive quarters of decline. The smartphone market, which grew consistently even through the downturn, was up 39% in the quarter. Motorola (NYSE:MOT) returned to the top 5 smartphone vendors list, while in the mobile phone market its share declined. Samsung and LG recorded strong market share gains. >>>

CDN Market Trends

Content delivery network (CDN) market leader Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM) has long charged a premium for its services, and rivals such Level 3 (NASDAQ:LVLT) have survived by being much cheaper. However, over the past quarter Akamai has been very aggressive in its prices, matching those of its rivals and sometimes undercutting them. The CDN market is crowded with about 50 vendors, but only four of them have revenues that exceed $50 million. Analysts expect the number of vendors to fall dramatically over the next two years. >>>

SaaS Talent Market Consolidates

The SaaS talent management market is clearly going for market consolidation. Over the past year, there have been numerous acquisitions in the space, the most recent being the $15 million acquisition of Inform by SuccessFactors (NASDAQ:SFSF). Let’s take a closer look. >>>

Acquisition Strategies At EMC And VMware

Global spending on IT is slowly but steadily coming back, an increase that is evident from the results of the various tech companies that we have seen in the past two weeks. Microsoft did come out with a strong set of numbers driven by the Windows 7 uptake. Google, as always, did well. Forrester Research expects IT spending in the United States to rise by 6.6% to $568 billion in 2010, with smart computing and cloud computing expected to lead the way. >>>